Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Miklos was offering him a cup of water. Clear Rhodopean water, somewhat stale from its cask, but sparkling fresh in Andrion’s mouth. He swished the liquid around his teeth, swallowed, found his voice. “Centurion, your orders were to wait a month before coming after me.”

  Miklos cocked his head to the side like an owl. “It has been a month, my lord. We left Sardis under a full moon, and I left Rhodope under the next full moon.”

  Laughter crackled in Andrion’s chest. “I meant a month after I left Rhodope, Miklos. Under the quarter waning moon.” He eyed his officer with mock severity.

  “Ah, well, my lord—I fear I misunderstood. But after the message came from Queen Chrysais …”

  “What message?” demanded Andrion, his humor vanishing with a snap. Tembujin stopped squeezing the mud from his tail of hair and stepped closer.

  “A Minran merchant brought it to me on Rhodope. That you and your party had been lost, shipwrecked on your arrival. The Queen said she was concerned, my lord, about your sword, which had been found on the beach …”

  Andrion’s scowl stopped Miklos’s words in his throat. Solifrax hissed beneath its coating of dirt and mud. “No wonder you came immediately. Thank you, Miklos.”

  The centurion bowed gravely.

  “What did you do with the message?” asked Dana, eyes wide with alarm.

  “I forwarded it to Governor-General Patros in Sardis, my lady.”

  “The hell you did!” she exclaimed.

  Miklos returned, with emphasis, “Such was my duty, my lady.”

  Dana stamped the deck in fierce despair. Andrion made an impatient, placatory gesture, trying to think. So Patros, and by corollary Ilanit, thought they were dead. Of course Eldrafel would send such a message on ahead, laying the foundation for his own arrival with Gard, the heir. What is surprising, Andrion told himself sourly, is that I never realized that that was what he had done. What, by all the gods, by any god at all, will I find when I return?

  “A merciful blindness,” Sumitra murmured. “We had quite enough to occupy ourselves without worrying over the anguish of our friends and relatives at home.”

  Andrion glanced from Dana’s stricken face to Tembujin’s contorted features. Slowly each relaxed into a weary nod. Sumi, as usual, was right.

  The ships rounded Minras’s southern shore, sliding through a sea that heaved as slowly and thickly as a nauseous stomach. Only now did Andrion realize the full extent of Taurmenios’s anger; the entire island was a charred hulk. Ash, smoke, and soot stretched in monstrous plumes all the way to the horizon.

  The ships approached the bulge of Mount Tenebrio on the east. Andrion saw that the mountain was rent by a chasm, the one across the floor of the evil temple grossly swollen and spewing black fumes like clouds of bats. It might be early afternoon in Sardis, in Sabazel, but here it was eternal dusk.

  Sardis and Sabazel. Something sparked in a crevice of Andrion’s mind, and he seized eagerly upon it. “That message is for the best,” he announced. “What better way to give Eldrafel the lie than to appear at his back, just as he claims the Empire for Gard?”

  Dana vented a grim laugh. “Indeed, I shall appear at his back.”

  “I beg your pardon, my lord?” asked Miklos, not knowing those names.

  Andrion dreaded explanations. Chrysais, he thought, had us lulled into complacency; a master touch, to send that message about Gath’s death. Who would suspect a helpless widow of plotting the overthrow of an emperor? Andrion’s breath exploded in a growling sigh. As helpless as an adder. “And have you had messages from Sardis in return?”

  Miklos frowned. “No, my lord, I fear not.”

  Andrion inhaled to swear. Sumitra gasped and pointed back toward Minras.

  Blackness boiled with dizzying speed into the sky. Lightning coruscated in the turbulence, flickering in tortured branches between sea and land. Flickering and forming into sketches, winged bulls, a gargoyle, chariots …

  Andrion shot a look at Dana. She did not flinch. “Of course,” she murmured, her voice thin and taut, “the fiery chariots that have haunted me—they are not Sardian, they warn of Sardis’s destruction!”

  “How could that cloud threaten Sardis?” asked Miklos.

  But Andrion was chilled to the bone; this time Dana was not misled. The chariots seethed in spectral shapes, horses and drivers clearly defined, and then swept away. The cloud parted, coalesced, parted again.

  An immense detonation rolled across the sea, swelling, swelling, until the sky itself reverberated with it and Andrion’s head was shattered with its pressure. A shrieking wind took every ship aback, flinging every human body like spilled cargo onto the deck.

  In a roiling cloud of black fire Minras disappeared. The sea shuddered and dashed itself into whitecaps. A blast of steam cleft the dark cloud with white. From the purple-sailed merchanter came a wail of dismay. Niarkos? Andrion asked himself, struggling to the rail. The sturdy sea lion, bleating like a calf?

  The horizon beneath the cloud gathered itself into a mountain of water. A mountain that came rushing forward, spume like fangs upon its face. And Andrion realized what Niarkos shouted. A tidal wave. A tidal wave that would indeed destroy Sardis.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dana was not quite sure what a tidal wave was. But the tone in Niarkos’s voice, and the sudden pallor of Andrion’s lips, stirred her mind.

  She saw a wall of water bearing down upon the delta of the Sar and inundating it, uprooting trees, tossing galleys about like twigs, sweeping away the port of Pirestia and throwing the remains like projectiles at the walls of Sardis. It flooded the precious irrigation wells and canals with seawater and reduced the rich farmlands to a salt marsh.

  She shivered; no, such a wave would not necessarily destroy the city itself. But it could wring out its guts and leave it poor and feeble, even more susceptible to the vile blandishments of Rowan and Eldrafel; the priest-king would no doubt turn even unanticipated disaster to his own purposes.

  The ocean buckled, the wave mounting higher and higher, Andrion’s height, twice, thrice. Dana looked up into murky blue-green depths. The galley heeled over and stayed almost on its side for an excruciatingly long moment; Andrion held Sumitra tightly against the mast; Tembujin, Dana, and Miklos scrabbled for the rail and clung like monkeys. Here there is no shore to struggle toward, Dana thought, only the bottomless sea to devour us all. Cold droplets lashed her face and drummed across the deck. A sailor slipped and with a wail disappeared into the sea.

  Just below the crest of the wave the galley wallowed upright and hung suspended, falling and yet not falling as the surge of water fell eternally forward beneath it. Divine grace, Dana’s mind stammered. Do not question it. The other ships bobbed like bits of seaweed on a swell. On a swell before it encounters the shore and becomes a breaker. But no shore lay west of Minras until the rocky shoals a day’s journey from Rhodope.

  Wind howled against Dana’s ears. A clean, cold, salt wind scoured her lungs. Wind! she exulted. But this gale was not Ashtar’s breath but the rush of their movement as the flotilla was carried westward with breathtaking swiftness. And that, Dana realized, that dark beetling blotch on the horizon was Eldrafel’s trireme riding the same wave. Damn the man, or demon, or whatever he was! We escaped, and yet he goes before us like a shadow cast by the setting sun!

  Water burbled and seethed beneath the bow of the galley. Wood and rope labored, groaning, but not one human voice uttered a sound. The purple sail flapped thunderously and ripped from top to bottom once, twice, until it became streaming purple pennons. Purple pennons waving above Bellasteros’s gold pavilion, above Andrion’s gold pavilion; Dana’s thought shrieked like the tortured air. Her white-knuckled hands kneaded the railing in a paroxysm of terror and elation mingled. The shield sang a fierce paean to wind and water, and to the profound silence beyond. Shock, she told herself, squeezing oddly detached runnels of reason from her mind; her consciousness was sustained like the ships by a thread of time that sp
un out and out and out until reality faded into eternity.

  The wave swept on. The sky lightened, becoming an elusive silver rose. The curtain across the sun thinned into gauze and then vanished. The great red disk touched the horizon and saluted it with a splash of scarlet. Scarlet pennons. Scarlet and purple. It was evening. Dana gasped for breath and woke.

  The remote shape of the trireme vanished into gathering darkness. Someone shouted, intruding words into the rush of air and wave. The sea ahead of the wave was sucked back toward it; just breaking the surface was a line of rocky shoals like ruined stone walls. Rhodope? Dana asked herself. That was the word the voice shouted. The name of Rhodope. The wave had carried them half a month’s journey in one day. Carried like lice in the robes of the gods.

  Awareness darkened Andrion’s dazed eyes. Sumitra stirred. Tembujin muttered something about horses and camels. Miklos twitched beside him, but Jemail continued to clutch a hatch cover as if married to it.

  Something prickled in Dana’s mind, down her neck and along her shoulder blades. The shield emitted a quizzical chime. This wave might not destroy Sardis, but it would annihilate Rhodope, Sardis’s ally. The flotilla might be swept around the island, or it might be dashed into splinters of wood and bone against Rhodope’s shore.

  Dana’s thought wrenched with the birth pang of a desperate certainty. She lurched from the rail and seized not Andrion’s arm but his belt. There, the sardonyx amulet. She held it up, gold and white glinting with its own fell light. The tiny twisted face seemed to laugh.

  “Ah!” Andrion croaked, his voice soggy but his mind plunging after hers. “The last mote of dying Tenebrio’s power, to appease the last wrath of dead Taurmenios!”

  He secured Sumi’s hands on the mast. Solifrax flared from its sheath, steaming in the sea spray. The shield yanked Dana’s arm upward. She threw the amulet against the embossed star, and the star snapped in its own rain of silver droplets. Andrion’s wrist flexed, and Solifrax speared the miniature gargoyle through its stony heart and crushed it against the light of the shield.

  It emitted a piercing alien scream and wriggled between blade and shield. An icy wind pealed down from the west, dashing against the towering wave and its accompanying gale. The water was struck into foam. The wave faltered, shivering into fissures, embankments, towers of liquid. The ships tossed and spun crazily, and Dana and Andrion fell together toward the rail.

  The gargoyle’s cry trailed into nothingness. The wind intensified. The ocean heaved, convulsed, and began ponderously to spin. Dana’s damp, gritty hair whipped across her face and she shook it away. Whirlpool, her thought shrilled. A whirlpool large enough to swallow the entire fleet, sides glassy gleaming blue-green eyes watching, waiting… . Her thought cracked like lightning. So did Solifrax. As one, she and Andrion threw the shard of sardonyx into the maw of the sea.

  And were flung back in a tangled pile against the mast as the ship turned upside down. No, Dana thought, peering out from water-prismed lashes, no, we only took a breaking wave. She was drenched, chilled to the bone, her body only tatters of flesh about her will. But the huge wave was gone, and the sea, while dancing in torment, no longer cowered before the wrath of the god.

  The wind from the west purled through the rigging, carrying the elusive odor of anemone. “Thank you,” Dana wheezed, “thank you, Mother.”

  The shield burbled and fell silent. Andrion sheathed Solifrax with a sigh and hugged Sumitra and Dana both.

  I shall laugh, Dana thought dazedly. I shall cry. I shall howl hysterically. But she was drained, and could only cling shamefacedly to Andrion, resting her face against his sepia-stubbled cheek. His body quivered next to hers. Sumitra’s lustrous gaze lay softly upon her. Does she hate me for loving him? But she is incapable of hatred. And Sabazel does not demand that I hate her.

  A shadow swelled along the eastern rim of the sea, night rising from the grave of Minras. For a moment a rainbow arched overhead, cruelly indifferent. Then it winked out. Shadow consumed the sky. The disheveled flotilla struggled on toward Rhodope.

  *

  A crescent moon, the evening star a sparkle at its tip, followed the sun down a lurid western sky. Sumitra considered them and what they symbolized; sword and shield, Sardis and Sabazel, Andrion’s necklace. She glanced at him through her lashes.

  No messages had waited on Rhodope. Even after two day’s rest and food, after a shave and a haircut and several baths, his cheekbones were as harsh as cut stone, his expression so tight that deep lines bracketed his mouth and eyes. His eyes in the crimson twilight smoldered.

  “No,” Dana said wearily in answer to his question, “we only caused the destruction of Minras because we would not bow our necks meekly to Eldrafel’s blade. It was he who unleashed the wrath of Taurmenios, as he meant to unleash Tenebrio.”

  “He underestimated the power of Taurmenios,” reflected Andrion, “and overestimated the power of Tenebrio.”

  “Who overstayed his welcome on Minras, I daresay.” Tembujin slapped lacquer on the bow presented to him by the governor of Rhodope, his face concealed by his fringe of hair, his gestures as taut as his bowstring.

  Did the generations of gods pass as did the generations of men? Sumitra asked herself. But to that she had no answer. A breeze, the last remnant of the mighty wind that had laid the wave, wafted over the shore.

  “That amulet,” Andrion said. “It did have some power in it. But it could not have been too much a part of Eldrafel’s plot, or he would never have abandoned it.”

  “Khalingu’s tongue!” Tembujin muttered. “The entire island is destroyed, and still Eldrafel is not dead!”

  Dana wiped the shield in her lap; carrying it, she had refused a bow and taken a sword instead. “The amulet did not enspell Chrysais, Andrion, if that is what you think.”

  “She bought her choices,” Sumitra said, “and paid for them.”

  Andrion shook his head sadly. With a sigh Dana, too, gazed up at the heavenly necklace, her face shimmering with its implacable beauty and with the rippling clouds of the Sight. “Gard thinks he caused the destruction by his desperate prayer for intervention in the arena.”

  Sumitra grimaced with pity. The child was force fed maturity; she pleaded that he would have a strong enough stomach to survive. Andrion’s crisp profile softened. He reached from his chair, captured Sumi’s hand, kissed it. The baby in her belly tried a slow somersault, and despite the solemnity of the moment, she smiled.

  “Gard lives then?” Andrion asked Dana.

  “The wave cut half a month from our return trip,” Dana replied, “but it did the same for Eldrafel, and Gard and Rue with him. He will be on the mainland before us, Andrion.”

  “Eldrafel has to take the Empire now,” said Sumitra quietly, “or he will have no realm at all.”

  “If his father Tenebrio was the source of his power,” offered Tembujin, “then surely his power has been greatly dissipated with Tenebrio’s death.”

  Sumitra said, “He used his power as he used everything, extravagantly; has he not used it up?”

  “I hope so.” Andrion’s fingertips drummed on the sheath of Solifrax, raising small whorls of light. Red evening faded into a night dusted with silver, servants moved along the porch of the governor’s mansion lighting lamps, and Ashtar spread her stars across the sky. Even here the stars were slightly smeared, tentative, and the sea breeze was tainted with ash and decay.

  The zamtak, still wrapped by its piece of tapestry, lay beside Sumitra’s chair. Despite the delirium of their arrival on Rhodope, she had remembered to thank Dana for saving it. But grave Dana had shrugged gratitude away. Sumitra picked up the instrument, slipped, off the covering, began to tune it. The tiny trills and plinks formed a minor melody, repeating the note of the breeze. Below the prominence where the mansion stood, the sea intoned a harmony to the music.

  Just music. No purpose but to express a moment of peace before the struggle began again. Miklos and Niarkos, aided by a bemused Jemail, were
even now preparing the Sardian legion stationed here to return home. As they settled the Minran refugees here. Only a few refugees, a tithe of the population of the once prosperous island. Sumitra essayed a brief jig but her fingers slipped on the strings, producing an uncomfortable twang. A plaintive ballad, yes, that would do. Solifrax sighed like embers settling. The shield ran with faint, distracted rivulets of light. Like Dana’s eyes, the silken sheen of moon and star not quite smoothing the troubled soul beneath.

  Sumi’s hand stroked the zamtak, calmly, calmly—the Empire is Andrion’s, and Andrion’s it will remain—the gods test him, they goad him, but he has never betrayed them, and they will not abandon him… .

  Dana’s face twisted, not in pain but in labor. “What do you see?” Andrion asked quietly. Tembujin laid down his bow and bent forward to listen.

  Her voice floated on the music, a melodic parody of the evil words she repeated. “Sabazel must be the home of witches; true women are too foolish to rule a kingdom. And they must consort with demons. Why else would they seal their borders so tightly, if not to hide evil secrets?”

  “Many men have been received there graciously,” Andrion snorted, “although they want only to amuse themselves; in their shame they are likely to believe such lies, are they not?”

  “No men, no children,” snapped Dana. “I would wish to receive no men at all.” But the shield spattered wry light motes, as did Dana’s eye.

  Just music? Sumitra asked herself. Her fingers thrilled on the strings, drawing Dana’s voice to continue, drawn to Dana’s continuing voice.

  “The spells of Sabazel are devious indeed. The conqueror Bellasteros himself was subverted. Lord Andrion his son was tainted by its wiles. But they are free now, safe in the wings of Harus, who shall protect them in the hereafter from the poisons of the demoness Ashtar.”

  Andrion growled some epithet.

  “By the wiles of the Sabazians the barbarian Khazyari were offered peace, and given the land good men bled to defend. Lord Andrion, rest his merciful and honorable soul, was blinded by the witches, and did not see his own sister Sarasvati corrupted; he did not realize what blasphemy he uttered when he wished to make her half-breed child his heir. But he is free now, protected by the wings of Harus from the poisons of Ashtar.”